U.S. Broadband Users Beware

[schatzy]

The start is here for metered broadband usage.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080117/...er_internet_dc

Edit: Just found http://blogs.computerworld.com/time_..._internet_caps

Streaming Music from you SB to work might be a problem sooner than some of us are willing to think about.

[MuckleEck]

All I can say to our American friends is wake up and smell the coffee.....we have had pricing based roughly on usage and "Fair Usage Policies" which are undefined for a few years...and it sucks....

[dcote]

thanx for the heads up!

luckily for us in germany, consumer protection laws wont allow "fair use", because "fair use" is not defined, and it is therefore unclear what you are buying.

our ISPs either provide *un-*limited (true flatrate) OR the bandwidth/GB limit must be specified.

unfortunately, this is not true for other EU-countries, such as austria... :-(

[iPhone]

The start is here for metered broadband usage.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080117/...er_internet_dc

Edit: Just found http://blogs.computerworld.com/time_..._internet_caps

Streaming Music from you SB to work might be a problem sooner than some of us are willing to think about.

I have a better idea, ban Utube and all those other stupid bandwidth hog sites. If they really want to bill for high abusive useage, then put a surcharge on downloading bandwidth hog video files! Time Warner better also wake up because two companies are already selling TV and movie content over the Internet so you no longer need Cable TV. They are going to lose revenue on cable TV and end up with broadband capacity problems!

Besides in the end it will come down to the consumer making adjustments and choices. DSL has already found out that one size all you can eat does not work and came up with multiple unlimited packages. Because that is an oxymoron, all that really happened was some consumers felt better paying the price they felt was reasonable.